Eclipse Plug-ins (3rd Edition) [Paperback]

Eric Clayberg (Author), Dan Rubel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321553462 | ISBN-13: 978-0321553461 | Publication Date: December 21, 2008 | Edition: 3

Producing a commercial-quality plug-in means going above and beyond the minimal requirements needed to integrate with Eclipse. It means attending to all those details that contribute to the “fit and polish” of a commercial offering. This comprehensive guide covers the entire process of plug-in development, including all the extra steps needed to achieve the highest quality results.

Building on two internationally best-selling previous editions, Eclipse Plug-ins, Third Edition, has been fully revised to reflect the powerful new capabilities of Eclipse 3.4. Leading Eclipse experts Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel present detailed, practical coverage of every aspect of plug-in development, as well as specific, proven solutions for the challenges developers are most likely to encounter.

All code examples, relevant API listings, diagrams, and screen captures have been thoroughly updated to reflect both the Eclipse 3.4 API and the latest Java syntax. In addition, Clayberg and Rubel have completely revamped their popular Favorites View case study, reworking much of its content and recreating its code from scratch. The authors carefully cover new functionality added to existing Eclipse features, such as views and editors, and fully explain brand-new features such as Commands, GEF, and PDE Build.

This extensively revised edition

• Thoroughly covers Eclipse’s new preferences
• Illuminates the powerful new Eclipse Command Framework, which replaces Eclipse’s older Action Framework
• Presents extensive new discussions of using commands with views and editors
• Introduces Mylyn, the new task-focused interface that reduces information overload and simplifies multi-tasking
• Contains an all-new chapter on using the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) to build dynamic, interactive graphical user interface elements
• Walks you step by step through the entire PDE Build process
• Shows how to create update sites with p2, which replaces Eclipse’s old Update Manager

This book is designed for every experienced developer interested in extending the Eclipse platform, the Rational Software Development Platform, or any other platform that supports Eclipse plug-ins.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I’m often asked, ‘What are the best books about Eclipse?’ Number one on my list, every time, is Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins. I find it to be the clearest and most relevant book about Eclipse for the real-world software developer. Other Eclipse books focus on the internal Eclipse architecture or on repeating the Eclipse documentation, whereas this book is laser focused on the issues and concepts that matter when you’re trying to build a product.”

— Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Director, Open Source Process, Eclipse Foundation

 

“As the title suggests, this massive tome is intended as a guide to best practices for writing Eclipse plug-ins. I think in that respect it succeeds handily. Before you even think about distributing a plug-in you’ve written, read this book.”

— Ernest Friedman-Hill

Sheriff, JavaRanch.com

 

“If you’re looking for just one Eclipse plug-in development book that will be your guide, this is the one. While there are other books available on Eclipse, few dive as deep as

Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins.”

— Simon Archer

 

“Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins was an invaluable training aid for all of our team members. In fact, training our team without the use of this book as a base would have been virtually impossible. It is now required reading for all our developers and helped us deliver a brand-new, very complex product on time and on budget thanks to the great job this book does of explaining the process of building plug-ins for Eclipse.”

— Bruce Gruenbaum

“This is easily one of the most useful books I own. If you are new to developing Eclipse plug-ins, it is a ‘must-have’ that will save you lots of time and effort. You will find lots of good advice in here, especially things that will help add a whole layer of professionalism and completeness to any plug-in. The book is very focused, well-structured, thorough, clearly written, and doesn’t contain a single page of ‘waffly page filler.’ The diagrams explaining the relationships between the different components and manifest sections are excellent and aid in understanding how everything fits together. This book goes well beyond Actions, Views, and Editors, and I think everyone will benefit from the authors’ experience. I certainly have.”

— Tony Saveski

 

“The authors of this seminal book have decades of proven experience with the most productive and robust software engineering technologies ever developed. Their experiences have now been well applied to the use of Eclipse for more effective Java development. A must-have for any serious software engineering professional!”

— Ed Klimas

 

“Just wanted to also let you know this is an excellent book! Thanks for putting forth the effort to create a book that is easy to read and technical at the same time!”

— Brooke Hedrick

 

“The key to developing great plug-ins for Eclipse is understanding where and how to extend the IDE, and that’s what this book gives you. It is a must for serious plug-in developers, especially those building commercial applications. I wouldn’t be without it.”

— Brian Wilkerson

From the Publisher

Build commercial-grade extensions to Eclipse and WebSphere Studio Workbench

This is the first definitive, start-to-finish guide to building commercial-quality extensions for both Eclipse and IBM's WebSphere Studio Workbench. Leading Eclipse developers Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel don't merely introduce the basics: they show how to add the sophistication and "polish" that paying customers demand.

This book presents detailed, practical coverage of every aspect of plug-in development--with specific solutions for the challenges you're most likely to encounter. It contains everything you need to gain mastery and achieve results: cookbook-style code examples, relevant API listings, diagrams, screen shots, and much more.

Includes a quick introduction to Eclipse for experienced Java programmers
Serves as a systematic reference for experienced Eclipse users
Introduces all the tools you need to build Eclipse and WebSphere plug-ins
Explains the Eclipse architecture and the structure of plug-ins and extension points
Walks step-by-step through building complete Eclipse plug-ins
Offers practical guidance on building Eclipse user interfaces with SWT and JFace
Shows how to use change tracking, perspectives, builders, markers, natures, and more
Covers internationalization, Help systems, feature planning--even branding

This book is designed for anyone who wants a deep understanding of Eclipse, and every experienced developer interested in extending Eclipse or WebSphere Studio Workbench. Whether you're a tool developer building new commercial products, or a user customizing your environment, you'll find it indispensable. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 928 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 3 edition (December 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321553462
• ISBN-13: 978-0321553461
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #458,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Detailed and comprehensive, November 12, 2004

By 

Manuel A. Ricart "aricart" (Cottage Grove, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-Ins (Paperback)

This book is the better one I have found for learning about plugin development for Eclipse. Most books present a very simple example which fails given the scope of Eclipse and the multitude of extension points. This one doesn't. It tries to address all the things that you may want to do (put an action in different places, integrating with different resource types (files,etc) and existing views (editors,etc), saving, UI, UI decoration, and on and on).

It takes a project and puts it through a complete development cycle building and adding features through the book. While I typically don't like books that take a single example and develop it throughout, this has enough meat to make it very useful. Sections that introduce different concepts/areas, will also give you extension points/view names for those areas so I can see the book as a valuable reference after the initial read.

One very cool thing with the sample project is that the authors develop JUnit tests for the UI actions and things. This shows not only how to automate testing of the UI features, but how eclipse calls your plugins. This provides additional insight that is useful not only in testing, but also in feature development. As it shows you how to load/find certain things programmatically.

If you use books as a tutorial from end-to-end, and tend to type over the examples to build mechanical memory of code, you may run into a few small snags. Chapter 7 misses listing some of the classes you are going to need (minor types, which you can figure out), and some minor disagreements in the code will create errors in the project, but these are easy to fix.

The code style is OK, but could be more concise and streamlined at times.

I would have given the book 5 stars if it wasn't because the book was developed under a pre-release of Eclipse 3.0. This made for some of the screen shots to be inconsistent, and very few of the api calls used in the examples are deprecated. This is more for Addison-Wesley than for the authors. Publishers always want to release books early, and this is hard on both writers (writing against a changing target) and the readers getting something that doesn't match the actual product.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good book, February 8, 2006

By 

Jos van Roosmalen (The Netherlands, Europe) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-Ins (Paperback)

This is a very good book because:

1. It doesn't contain cheap fillers such as JavaDoc References, and repeating things endless etc. For people new to Eclipse chapter 1 gives an introduction to Eclipse: it's very to-the-point.

2. It's very comprehensive. From testing (PDE JUnit) to creating your preferences pages. It's well organized.

3. The length of the code snippets is ok (not too long (filler), not too short). A lot of code is supported by screenshots to explain the code/text.

4. It's just complete!

ONE WARNING: This book covers a pre-release of Eclipse 3.0 and NOT Eclipse 3.1. A reprint of this book is expected in april 2006 (according to the publisher's website). If you can't wait: just buy this book. It's really good. If you can wait wait for the 3.1 edition because some things are changed in Ecllipse 3.1.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too many trees, too little forest, June 16, 2008

By 

Thomas Maurer - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I am writing Eclipse plug-ins for almost two years now and owned this book almost from the beginning. Looking back I must say that the book helped me get started and let me believe "it's possible". As probably many others I was a little intimidated at first by the vast possibilities of the framework.
Now that I am much more experienced I must say that whenever I look into the book it leaves me a little bit disappointed. It only adds little value to the "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide" which is part of the online documentation and already covers a lot.
The book goes into details and code very quickly without explaining the concepts very well. I still use the book every now and then for finding some nuggets not covered elsewhere and sometimes I get lucky but not too often.
Shall you buy this book? If you are a beginner and if you like to learn by programming a sample plug-in then yes. The more proficient you get the more the book will lose its value and you will use other sources of information.